For the Love of Rome

PROLOGUE La Signore and Ettore, the houseboy, were sitting in the garden at the side of the palazzo when my wife and I drove into Via Ajaccio. Nothing could have been more satisfying than the sight of those two behind the high iron fence as they rose to welcome us to the Pensione Desiree, and to Rome. What a bella giornata! Yes, a lovely April day. Giving us a hand with our luggage, they showed us to a large room facing the street. It was just right for our special need of space for books and papers. They served us coffee there, and later we enjoyed a satisfactory dinner in a dining room overlooking a garden full of bushes bearing dark purple flowers. We were in Rome to stay, and soon we would be seeking more adequate quarters; but for the moment we were well pleased. We were not strangers to Rome. We had been here a year earlier for a month, had enjoyed several operas, and in a rented car had driven far afield to Ravenna on the Adriatic, to Venice and Florence, Pisa, Verona, Orvieto, Siena, and elsewhere --about thirty towns and villages. Now we had our own Karmen-Ghia for further explorations. Many of our friends had questioned our decision to settle in Rome, urging us instead to go to Florence. But we knew that only Rome would do, for although we would find nothing in our ancestry to link us to the city, we felt as others before us had felt --a homing instinct of the heart that drove us there. We had met many people who disliked Rome. Venice and Pisa and other Italian cities appealed to them; Rome aroused in them a strange hostility. Did anyone really like Rome? Nobody criticized Florence or argued about Perugia or Bologna or Verona. Who liked Rome? Priests and scholars did, and government bureaucrats in fat jobs; the rich --and laymen like ourselves, who were fascinated by the mazes of history and the eternal mystery of Rome: what it was, why it was there at all when so many times it had been near death. Whatever the answers, we could not retreat. If we had doubts, we could fortify our feelings by recalling what others had felt. Here was the French writer Stendhal, for instance, standing in the morning sun of October 16, 1832, at San Pietro in Montorio on the Janiculum, joyously looking at Rome and beyond. A few small white clouds floated above Monte Albano. A delicious warmth filled the air. There was sweetness in Stendhal and a sting in the skeptics. Still, some sort of defense seemed desirable, not because Rome demanded it, but for one's own satisfaction. Rome was indifferent. It asked nothing, and it gave everything.